Ancient Baby Graveyard Not for Child Sacrifice, Scientists Say

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A Carthaginian burial site was not for child sacrifice but was
instead a graveyard for babies and fetuses, researchers now say.

A new study of the ancient North African site offers the latest
volley in a debate over the primary purpose of the graveyard,
long thought to be a place of
sacred sacrifice.

"It's all very great, cinematic stuff, but whether that was a
constant daily activity ― I think our analysis contradicts that,"
said study co-author Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of
Pittsburgh.

The city-state of Carthage was founded in the ninth century B.C.,
when Queen Dido fled Phoenicia (along the eastern Mediterranean
shore) for what is now Tunis, Tunisia. The empire became a
powerhouse of the ancient world and fought
several wars against the Romans.

When archaeologists began excavating the ancient civilization
last century, they found urns with the cremated remains of
thousands of babies, young goats and lambs at a graveyard called
the Tophet, which had been used from 700 to 300 B.C. At its peak,
the Tophet may have been bigger than a football field and had
nine levels of burials.

Based on historical accounts, scientists believed Carthaginians
sacrificed children at the Tophet before burying them there. For
instance, the Bible describes
child sacrifice to the deity Baal, worshipped by a
civilization in Carthage. A Greek and a Roman historian both
recount gory tales from this time period in which of priests slit
the throats of babies and tossed them into fiery pits, Schwartz
said. [ 8
Grisly Archaeological Discoveries ]

However, those accounts came from Carthage's enemies. "Some of
this might have been anti-Carthaginian propaganda," Schwartz told
LiveScience.

In 2010 Schwartz and his colleagues used dental remains from 540
individuals to argue that the site was not primarily for ritual
child slaughter, and they reiterate that stance in this month's
issue of the journal Antiquity. In the new article, the
researchers cite several older studies to validate their methods
for estimating
infant ages from tooth fragments.

The team argues that many tooth fragments found at the Tophet
were actually developing tooth buds from the jaws of fetuses and
stillborn babies who could not have been live sacrifices. As
evidence, they showed that half of the teeth lacked a sign of
birth called the neonatal line. The stress of birth temporarily
halts tooth development in newborns, creating a tiny, dark line
in their tooth buds; however, the line doesn't form until a week
or two after birth.

Other researchers still believe the Tophet was a place for sacred
killing.

"This is not a regular cemetery; the age distribution suggests
they were sacrificing infants at the age of 1 month," said
Patricia Smith, an anthropologist at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem.

Smith's team published a 2011 paper questioning Schwartz's dental
analysis. The incredible heat and pressure generated during
cremation usually erase the neonatal line, she said, so its
absence isn't a reliable measure of age. Schwartz's team
miscalculated how much teeth shrink in cremation, leading to an
underestimate of infant ages, Smith argued.

Smith also doubts Carthage would have routinely cremated
stillbirths or infants. Because of sky-high infant
mortality rates, babies were probably not considered people
until they were at least 1 or 2 years old. The Carthaginians
chopped down most of their trees to plant crops and wouldn't have
used the precious wood to burn babies, she said.

"The Carthaginians were seafarers; they needed wood for ships,
they needed wood for cloth, they needed wood for their tools,"
she said.